Residents can pay a $48 voluntary fee for the year which allows them to call 9-1-1 as many times as necessary.

Or, there's the option of not signing up for the annual fee. Instead, they will be charged $300 if they make a call for help.

According to Song, Japan's population of children is declining so Toei's audience is shrinking at home, and overseas anime bit-torrents are cutting into DVD sales.

"The way people consume anime is changing and our fans are ahead of the curve... we're learning the hard way and getting burned by piracy" stated Song.

It's expensive to make quality anime and if the industry doesn't start experimenting with new formats and new business models then many production companies will get hit hard.

According to the filings in Blake J Robbins v Lower Merion School District (PA) et al, the laptops issued to high-school students in the well-heeled Philly suburb have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools' administrators, who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families.

The idea that a school district would not only spy on its students' clickstreams and emails (bad enough), but also use these machines as AV bugs is purely horrifying.

Rumors are flying that there's a battle within the NY Times on how to price their app for the iPad. Those on the newspaper side of the house apparently believe that it should be priced at $20 to $30/month to avoid cannibalizing the print product.

Remember what happened when Newsday tried to charge $20+ per month for access to its digital version? It got a grand total of 35 people to sign up.

So it's interesting to note that Pentagon boffins have now stated that perhaps the most intriguing reputed capability of Echelon - the ability to automatically pick out words of interest and flag that conversation up as important to its human masters - doesn't work.

The news comes as part of a solicitation from the Pentagon crazytech bureau, DARPA, in which the maverick military mayhem mavens request assistance with building a Robust Automatic Transcription of Speech (RATS) system.

The 31-year-old officer, who has not yet been named, was struck by a bullet in an exchange of fire with a suspect.

However, the bullet struck the badge and the officer suffered only minor injuries, reports the Las Vegas Sun.

Lipold told Wired.com that Mute Records gave him permission to post the XX Teens' song "Darlin" on his blog, for instance.

Five years of Lipold's labor of love was deleted, in part, because he posted a track with full permission of a label, and the track apparently wasn't even online by the time the IFPI filed its complaint.

The answer for now - unsatisfying though it may be - is for music bloggers to check their e-mails for DMCA takedown notices rigorously, and file counter-claims when they're falsely accused of posting something without permission.

Even if you are running a legitimately purchased copy of Windows, your system will check-in to make sure there's no funny stuff going on. If there is, you will be downgraded to non-genuine status, your background wallpaper will default to black and you will have to prove to Microsoft that your copy is genuine or buy another one.

Quite why Microsoft is delaying the rollout of this update in the Middle Kingdom remains unclear given that China is the country with the highest rate of counterfeit and hacked versions of the Vole's software.

What Conroy wants is for YouTube to voluntarily censor all material on its site that is "Refused Classification" by the Australian ratings board, a government agency.

This week, the problem country was Pakistan, where someone uploaded a video of President Zardari at a political rally. In the clip, Zardari gets irritated at some people near the stage and yells at them in English to "shut up!"

Iran's government, facing major internal unrest over its recent election results and resulting brutality, Iran simply blocked Gmail altogether.

The state's "Subversive Activities Registration Act," passed last year and now officially on the books, states that "every member of a subversive organization, or an organization subject to foreign control, every foreign agent and every person who advocates, teaches, advises or practices the duty, necessity or propriety of controlling, conducting, seizing or overthrowing the government of the United States ... shall register with the Secretary of State."